2061 Connections
An electronic newsletter for the science education community

May 2013

Toward High School Biology Unit Featured at NARST 2013 Conference

At this year’s conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), researchers from AAAS’s Project 2061 and its collaborator BSCS reported on the development of a new 8th grade curriculum unit and results from pilot tests of the unit in classrooms in four states. Students participating in the pilot tests showed significant learning gains after experiencing the unit, but the data also suggested a number of ways that the unit could be strengthened. The AAAS-BSCS team presented a set of five papers detailing the multiple sources of data that the research team was able to draw on as it considered what changes to make in the unit. The papers also describe key decision points in the curriculum development process and how the pilot test data on student and teacher learning and classroom enactment were used to revise and improve the unit.

Read New Middle-School Chemistry Curriculum Shows Promise on the major findings presented at the NARST meeting at the AAAS website, and three of the papers from the set: Developing and Evaluating an Eighth Grade Curriculum Unit That Links Foundational Chemistry Ideas to Biological Growth

Selecting Core Ideas and Practices – An Iterative Process
Jo Ellen Roseman, Director of Project 2061 and lead author
Using Student Measures to Evaluate the Promise of the Intervention
Cari Herrmann Abell, Senior Research Associate at Project 2061 and lead author
Using Teacher Measures to Evaluate the Promise of the Intervention
Jean Flanagan, Research Associate at Project 2061 and lead author


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